Abdul Hasan can spend hours watching old videos he shot on his cellphone. “My heart aches for my village, my home,” the 16-year-old Rohingya refugee from Myanmar said in a camp in neighbouring Bangladesh. “That’s why we have brought these memories, this video, from Myanmar.”
Since late August, hundreds of thousands of Rohingya Muslims have fled to Bangladesh to escape attacks by Myanmar security forces. But before fleeing from advancing soldiers, few Rohingya had time to grab many of their belongings. Instead, they poured across the border into Bangladesh bringing with them little more than horror stories of marauding forces and memories of terrifying treks through the forests. Their old lives — homes, cattle, villages, everything — are gone. All they have left is their memories.
But if they’re lucky, some of those memories are stored on the cellphones many refugees managed to bring with them.